Thank you to the gracious Ann Voskamp for hosting me on her blog and for incorporating her beautiful photos. You can start here and then head over to Ann's blog to see and read the rest—including a bit of Gomer's story. I love how her story displays the deep, self-sacrificing love of a God who calls us back from all the places we have wandered so that we can finally come home to Him.
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Like many people, I’ve always been curious about my ethnic identity.
Whenever I asked where our family originated, my dad would chuckle and say, “You’re English, Irish, Scottish, French, German and a little Fox Terrier.”
That was his way of assuring me I was a garden variety, American mutt.
When the results of my recent DNA test arrived, there were a few surprises. Though I was disappointed to find no trace of Fox Terrier, it seemed I had some Scandinavian, Jewish, and even North African roots.
I began to wonder what it would be like to travel back in time in order to meet the people who populated my family tree.
Though the technology for that doesn’t exist, there’s another aspect of my heritage—and yours too—that can be explored in some detail.
It’s our spiritual ancestry.
Reading some of the Bible’s great stories offers us the opportunity not only to learn about God but to explore our Spiritual DNA.
Jewish children tend to think about characters like Sarah and Abraham and Jacob, Rachel, and Leah, not as strangers from the distant past, but as elderly aunts and uncles, the first shoots on their family tree.
Because of what Christ has done, we’ve been grafted into that tree, which means that these people are related to us as well.